Mark Driscoll: "Avatar [is] the most demonic, satanic film I’ve ever seen."

And if you don’t believe me, go see Avatar, the most demonic, satanic film I’ve ever seen. That any Christian could watch that without seeing the overt demonism is beyond me. I logged on to christianitytoday.com and the review was reflective of Christianity today, very disappointing. See, in that movie, it is a completely false ideology, it’s a sermon preached. It’s the most popular movie ever made, and it tells you that the creation mandate, the cultural mandate is bad, that we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t develop culture, that’s a bad thing.

Primitive is good and advanced is bad and that we’re not sinners, we’re just disconnected from the divine life force, just classic, classic, classic paganism, that human beings are to connect, literally, with trees and animals and beasts and birds and that there’s this spiritual connection that we’re all a part of, that we’re all a part of the divine. It presents a false mediator with a witch. It presents false worship of created things rather than Creator God in absolute antithesis to Romans 1:25, which gives that as the essence of paganism. It has a false incarnation where a man comes in to be among a people group and to assume their identity. It’s a false Jesus. We have a false resurrection. We have a false savior. We have a false heaven. The whole thing is new age, satanic, demonic paganism, and people are just stunned by the visuals. Well, the visuals are amazing because Satan wants you to emotionally connect with a lie.

And some of you say, “This is my first time, is he a fundamentalist?” I’ve never been accused of that. I’ve been accused of many things, not being a fundamentalist. I do love film, I love story. My degree’s in communication. I’ve got two home theater systems. I’ve got three Tivos, all right, I am not against technology and the arts. Our film crew just was in L.A. at Universal Studios shooting on the Spartacus set to get all of our footage for Good Friday. Some of my friends are filmmakers and poets and artists and we’re a very creative church. We just don’t like Satan, that’s all. We love the arts, we just don’t like Satan. And it’s amazing to me that Christians are going to the movie going “That was so enlightening.” No, that was so darkening. It’s a worldview. It’s the way to view the world. “Oh, the problem isn’t sin, it’s disconnected from the divine demonic spiritual life force. Oh, the problem is not that I need a savior, the problem is that I need to live in tune with creation.” This is all eastern garbage -ism. It just is. “Spark a divinity within you, God is in everything. You don’t need God to come and save you.” That’s all it is, it’s worldliness.

What all this amounts to, grumbled New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, is Cameron’s “long apologia for pantheism,” which has been “Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now.” It’s the spirit that animates such classics as the Star Wars saga and The Lion King, along with the teachings of Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. Vatican Radio criticized the film for “cleverly wink[ing] at all those pseudo-doctrines that turn ecology into the religion of the millennium.” Movieguide said the film “has an abhorrent New Age, pagan, anti-capitalist worldview that promotes goddess worship and the destruction of the human race.” The only clear religion in Avatar is White Messianism, scoffed David Brooks at The New York Times, since “the natives” need a white man, Sully, to lead their crusade.

Whatever spiritual brew Cameron has served up, Christianity it ain’t.

Sadly, the engagement impulse has led many evangelicals to neglect their prophetic presence in the public square, as we often seem more set on distancing ourselves from our fundamentalist cousins than on seeking personal and corporate soul care. Discernment becomes an exercise in baptizing secular critics’ top picks, celebrating their vague spiritual themes but downplaying or ignoring pernicious ones. Or we revel in our freedom to enjoy an array of films, belittling our separatist siblings whose consciences are offended (1 Cor. 8).

The reality is, the engagers could stand to learn a few things from the separatists, and vice versa, as both camps survey the pop culture landscape. The engagers have developed keen eyes to find Light in the most unexpected places. Yet the separatists, who have an instinct for sensing the subtly devastating aspects of culture, can quicken our steps on the path of sanctification. With the engagers’ vision and the separatists’ instinct, the church and its moviegoers can navigate Hollywood’s muddled spiritualities with rigor and grace

[JobK] I hate to sound old-school fundamentalist, you know the sort that came up against rules against going to movies (but TV was OK!), women wearing pants and makeup, eating deviled eggs, etc. Which - surprise! - was the sort of rules based Pentecostalism that I was reared in. However, the problem with such pronouncements as these is the implicit underlying assumption: “Avatar” or “Last Temptation of Christ” or whatever other movie, TV show, secular music album, etc. is fine. Or at least not as bad. This assumption, of course, is false. The truth is that virtually all - literally 99.9% - of entertainment opposes the Bible in some way. It has to, or else it wouldn’t make a profit, because profiteering largely relies on non-Christians and carnal Christians. Yes, the anti-Biblical entertainment does include most of what is regarded as “faith-friendly” or “family-friendly”, including a large percentage of the entertainment that is specifically created for and marketed to evangelical Christians through Christian bookstores.

So, when we do stuff like target “Avatar” and “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars” BUT ONLY THOSE, we create the false impression that those things are bad, evil and horrible BUT EVERYTHING ELSE IS OK. Now of course, I do concede that there is such a thing as less evil and more evil, less harmful and more harmful. But less evil is still evil, less harmful is still harmful. So what are we gaining by denouncing the most harmful stuff while allowing the less harmful stuff to go by unnoticed and unopposed? Some of the experts in spiritual warfare (again, I was raised Pentecostal) state that evil spirts do the most damage when their work remains hidden, and especially when they are able to pass their work off as moral or virtuous, when they pretend to be angels of light.

So, the problem isn’t really “Avatar” or “Harry Potter”, which wears their occult/witchcraft/violence/sexuality elements out in the open, and brazenly contradicts everything the Bible teaches. The real problem instead is the stuff which claims to be positive, clean, Christian even, while still containing evil. The reason is that the person who wants to avoid “Avatar” will resort to those things instead, and convince himself that the sinful elements that he is still being exposed to and supporting are nonexistent or “not really that bad.”

An example: a lot of Christian entertainment, meaning movies, videos and books made by and marketing to Christians, are actually quite feminist. Strong male characters in much of the contemporary Christian works of fiction are practically nonexistent. Instead, the men are often weak wallflowers and the women (and children!) are depicted as being the reservoirs of strength, leadership, courage and wisdom. Why? Because A) Christian entertainers simply follow the blueprint left behind by secular ones and B) because they know that their paying customers are overwhelmingly female.